Picasso - 70 years since Guernica

The
prophetic description of anonymous warfare, the blankets of darkness and death
dropped over civilian populations still resonate. To the degree we realise the
truth expressed in this work, Guernica stands as possibly the greatest painting
of the 20th Century.

"What
do you think an artist is? An imbecile who, if he is a painter, has only eyes,
if he's a musician has only ears, if he's a poet has a lyre in each chamber of
his heart, or even if he's a boxer, just muscles? On the contrary, he is at the
same time a political being, constantly alert to the heart-rending stirring or
unpleasant events of the world, taking his own complexion from them. How would
it be possible to dissociate yourself from other men; by virtue of what ivory
nonchalance should you distance yourself from the life which they so abundantly
bring before you? No, painting is not made to decorate apartments. It is an
instrument for offensive and defensive war against the enemy." Pablo Picasso, Les Lettres Francaises, March 1945.

On
April 26, 1937 General Franco commissioned from the German High Command,
against Republican Spain, the aerial bombardment of the small and defenceless
Basque town of Guernica. The prototype of all future bombing raids, the Junker
and Heinkel bombers of the Legion Condor visited a hell on earth in the form of
bombs weighing up to 1000lbs across the town of 10, 00 people. Heinkel
fighters, according to press reports, machine-gunned the fleeing crowds as they
sought escape into the surrounding fields.

Some
two months later, seventy years ago this month, as the result of an already
existing contract between himself and the Spanish Republican Government, Pablo
Picasso, the most famous artist of the 20th century, was to deliver a large
painting to be installed at the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris World Fair. To
great controversy, Guernica was unveiled. Despite his enormous prestige the
establishment rarely tell us that Picasso was a man of the left.

About
six months ago I enjoyed the privilege of standing before this painting, housed
now in the Reina Sofia, Madrid's Museum of Modern Art. Against my expectations
and even to my surprise I found it an undoubtedly moving experience. Like many
paintings in their reproduction, we become desensitised to the expression of
force revealed only in the act of painting.

I
was aware this work was large, but I was not prepared for its actual scale, and
was made aware once again of the gulf between knowing something, and actually
experiencing it.

There
is no colour in this painting. Both colour and life have seemingly been drained
from its surface, with only extremes of grey, and silence. But the silence
shouts!

Playing
upon the allegory of the bullfight, the courageous â€˜fighter of the bull' is
pitted against the cruel and violent beast. But here the primitive urgings of
the beast emerge as the victor. The bull, perhaps a clue for Spain itself,
stands either indifferent to the scene of raging despair, or on the cusp of comprehension.
The human carnage, the torn bodies, are perhaps symbolic in Picasso's own
words, of â€˜a suffering humanity', engaged in acts not of their own agency, but
writhing from terror in the immediate aftermath of the raid.

Against Reaction

During
its execution, Picasso wrote the following in order to combat accusations of
political indifference to the plight of Spain: "The Spanish struggle is the
fight of reaction against the people, against freedom. My whole life as an
artist has been nothing more than a continuous struggle against reaction and
the death of art. How could anybody think for a moment that I could be in
agreement with reaction and death? ... In the panel on which I am working,
which I shall call Guernica, and in all my recent works of art, I clearly
express my abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain in an ocean of
pain and death."

Almost
unexpectedly, this ocean of agony is contained within an interior, restrained
twice, once by the painting's frame, and then also by the â€˜inside of life'. The
mother on the left cradles her broken infant as she screams heavenward. Below
her on the ground the horse thrown bull fighter, his sword and himself snapped
and defeated. The horse, apocalyptic, terrified, punctured, its neck
outstretched in an equine scream. Two women rush toward the horse and the
centre, one arm outstretched overhead holding a candle illuminating the bedlam,
while yet another woman collapses, arms outstretched to the sky, forlornly
pleading with the absent bringers of death.

Interestingly,
the electric light transformed itself at the close of the painting's execution
from an eye, but still reads as such, acting as both witness, and as a
commandment to look, and to see: - to act â€˜in the light of the eye'.

Picasso
refused to allow the painting to be exhibited in Spain under the Franco regime,
and not until 1981 did it move to Madrid from the Museum of Modern Art in New
York. More than any other painting of the â€˜modern' era this work undoubtedly
spoke its relevance, and its necessity, to a wide audience.

The
triumph of all great art is the dialectical convergence of form becoming
content, and content becoming form. Fighters for socialism are only too aware
of the â€˜horror without end' that Capitalism maintains as a future.

But
there is another future, one that is lit from above with both hope and with
life. In this space we must have art. The prophetic description of anonymous
warfare, the blankets of darkness and death dropped over civilian populations
still resonate. To the degree we realise the truth expressed in this work,
Guernica stands as possibly the greatest painting of the 20th Century.